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Game Makers Accusing Innocent People of Piracy In the UK
eldavojohn writes "It's a topic that a lot of game makers like Atari don't want the public hearing: game makers wrongfully accusing clearly innocent people of piracy. From the article, 'According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers. He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and has spoken to hundreds of others, he told the BBC.' If only a few are coming forward after receiving extortion letters ('Pay £500 OR ELSE!'), what's the actual number of those out there being wrongfully accused?"
They have been accusing innocent people of copyright infringement for years. Although this was limited to just their customers and potential customers. Of course when sales drop you have to expand your target audience.
My town, and most others in California, has a curfew for minors, 10:00pm. I've been hassled before walking around passed midnight. They let me move along when they realize I'm not some teenager though.
As disgusting as I find that (and saying that as someone who is regularly disturbed at night be drunk teenagers), it still doesn't equal a nationwide curfew for everyone.
A curfew for kids is actually taking the parents rights away to decide whether their kids are mature enough to be out past 10 pm. So it does go in a similar direction. Still, it's a far cry from a curfew for all adults.
And this amount of "70 cases" is relevant how, seeing that of course, the world only consisting of honest citizens, everybody rightfully accused of filesharing copyrighted content, would immediately admit to it?
I work for a law firm and I assure you this stuff is small fry for lawyers - the big money is in other fields of litigation, not sueing individuals for file sharing. It's the government and it's affiliated agencies that are at fault, as always they are persuing the filesharing community to try to stop and prevent further illegal filesharing. As always they have failed time and time again to provide filesharers with a legal and cost effective solution. Sueing the average Joe is never going to work in the long term, they'll catch a few major players and maybe make the example of the odd teenager to show that "no-one's" safe from the big bad wolf and then they will push it underground. The technology will get smarter as will filesharers and the Government will once again be behind in the fight.
I BUY all my games. I even have games that were only installed for an hour or less and are sitting on my shelf. This DRM crap, these accusations, this treating the customer as a criminal is fucking outrageous. I bought Far Cry 2. I could have downloaded it at least a week before it was even released. And, yet, me--the legal customer doing the right thing--has all these stupid DRM restrictions. I can accept that. If worse comes to worse I will get a pirated version of the SAME GAME, because I paid for the damn thing and I will play it on my computer any damn way I fuc*ing feel like. Why am *I* being punished for giving the game companies money? It's one of the most ridiculous situations in the gaming society. My LEGAL copy of Doom 3 I cannot play online 'cause someone (probably using a keygen) has MY serial number. I am sick of it. I am sick of the game companies hiding behind this masquerade. I am sick of being treated like a 2nd class citizen because I do the right thing.
Cut and paste!? They're far more efficient than that - time is money (literally) in a law firm, they have speadsheets and mail merges for that! They'll even charge you for the printing! ;)
What, precisely, is the downside for ATARI's troll? Yes, they could have to pay [taxed/controlled] defense legal costs. But the defendant would have to put up all the money first, then try to recover the judge's award included in the verdict.
Please tell me again, what is the downside? Judges may well fume. But they can do nothing. The letters are not extortion, but an "offer to settle" that might even be excluded from evidence as such!
The UK legal system mostly works because of self restraint. And poorly when that fails. Sometimes you can find a barrister who doesn't mind egg on his face. Solicters live there.
The situation with regard to music licensing is insane in the UK. The pub near my mother got fined about a year ago because they had the cheapest kind of live music license, which only allowed solo or duet performers. One evening, there was someone in the audience who knew the performers and was invited to join in for a few songs. When the pictures hit the press, someone from the council saw them, checked the license allowed it, and fined them.
A friend from my salsa class recently opened a cafe and wants to have dance evenings occasionally. She can't yet though, because the total for all of the licenses she needs (apparently you need a license to let people dance in your cafe - WTF?) comes to around £3000 and she's unlikely to make that much extra profit from them. Some of the license money goes to the copyright cartels, some to the councils. Unfortunately no one is standing for council election on a platform of encouraging small businesses by reducing license costs, yet people wonder why the city centre is gradually losing all of the small businesses to massive chains.
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Ironically, the DRM schemes designed to protect against piracy are more and more likely to make honest customers turn to piracy. The whole thing lends credence to the idea that what the game makers REALLY want out of DRM is to remove first sale rights, not combat piracy.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.